ROCHELLE — There’s a book that rests prominently on Rochelle schools Superintendent Todd Prusator’s desk, one that many members of his staff have studied and one that he references frequently.

It has nothing to do with transportation, although this city of fewer than 10,000 people has long and strong ties to rail and highways. It has nothing to do with food packaging, which makes up a bulk of the town’s industry. It has nothing to do with agriculture, either, even though a 10-minute drive in almost any direction lands you in a pasture or cornfield.

It’s a book about teaching children of poverty, a subject in which Prusator and his 120 teachers have taken a crash course over the past 10 years.

That’s because Prusator’s 1,700-student elementary school district is just one example of a dramatic change that’s sweeping the Rock River Valley.

Several of Rockford’s neighboring school districts — particularly smaller ones with a history of high test scores and few social problems — are seeing their state test scores drop as low-income populations skyrocket. Along with that, they’re seeing increases in the number of students who are learning English as a second language.

Rochelle’s proportion of low-income students has jumped to 62 percent from 22 percent in the past 10 years. English language learners now account for more than 20 percent of students, up from 5 percent. During the same span, the proportion of low-income students statewide rose to 49 percent from 36 percent. Districts across Illinois have on average 10 percent English learners in their student population.

“People underestimate the changes we’re going through as a small community,” said fourth-grade teacher Tina Horner. “I think even people in the community sometimes don’t even realize the changes we’re going through.”

Understanding the whys

The changes in Rochelle’s five elementary schools have forced school leaders and teachers in the Ogle County district to re-examine the way they teach students — from adding bilingual classrooms and increasing efforts in early intervention to expanding enrichment opportunities, aggressively revamping to align with new Common Core standards and studying best practices in the education of children of poverty.

“It’s not just looking at what we can do, but understanding why,” Prusator said. “Why do (low-income students) lag behind? If we understand the whys better, it will help us determine the whats.”

Five years ago, when the trends became apparent, Prusator became a student of Eric Jensen, a national expert on teaching poor kids. Then, he made it a priority for the rest of his staff to study Jensen and start applying his theories to their classrooms.

Page 2 of 4 - Teachers learned how skills like working memory and sequencing — key components of reading comprehension — tend to be weaker in low-income students. This isn’t because poor kids have bad memories, Prusator pointed out. It’s because they tend to have more worries and distractions from learning than children from wealthier families.

Poorer families tend to have more temporary homes. Their children face many more sources of uncertainty, ranging from whether they’ll eat dinner that night to whether they’ll have clean clothes to put on in the morning.

To combat this, teachers across the district introduced daily exercises to bulk up memory skills, like jumping jacks for the mind.

They learned how poverty affects a child’s emotional well-being and how that, too, can take a devastating toll on a child’s ability to learn. When fear and anxiety play too large a role in child’s life, Prusator said, they have a difficult time understanding other emotions.

“We can’t blame a student for not being able to do something that we haven’t taught them to do,” Prusator said. “That’s not just academically, that’s the social and emotional aspects, too. If a kid doesn’t have deferred gratification or patience or compassion or remorse, then we have to teach those things.”

Foundations in Spanish

About one-fifth of Rochelle’s students are English language learners, more than double the state average. Almost all of them speak Spanish. Most of them are from low-income backgrounds.

The majority of these students spend the school day in one of four bilingual education classrooms added by the district since 2006.

The program is an early exit model, explained bilingual coordinator Idalia Marin. Students are taught primarily in Spanish in kindergarten and first grade and begin a slow transition to learning in English as they get older.

By the time they’re in fourth grade, Marin said, bilingual students are in primarily English-speaking classrooms, and typically learning at a higher level than Spanish-speaking students whose parents insisted that their children be placed in English-speaking classrooms from the outset so “they can learn English right away.”

Part of Marin’s job is to help convince non-English-speaking parents to buy into Rochelle’s bilingual education program.

“The longer they remain learning in their native language, the easier and better the transfer is to English,” Marin said. “They already know how to read. They know phonics. It’s easier for them to switch over.”

Adding time, resources

Many of Rochelle’s English language learners also spend 2 1/2 hours after school in a special program that combines academics and enrichment.

Page 3 of 4 - About 270 students participate in HUB, which stands for Helping Us Building a Smarter, Stronger Community and also serves as a nod to Rochelle’s nickname, the Hub city.

HUB students spend about half of their time on reading and math and the other half engrossed in fun activities that expand their horizons. They plant gardens, and learn about airplanes and early settlers. They play with Legos and make crafts with duct tape.

“The biggest challenges to addressing issues of (English language learners) and low-income students are time and resources,” Prusator said. “The after-school program gives us both.”

HUB is in the first year of a $2.1 million five-year federal 21st Century Community Learning grant. The program includes transportation and is offered free of charge to low-income students with low state test scores. It extends into the summer, as well.

“If we have a student coming in second grade six months behind, if they have a fantastic year and nothing rotten happens at home, they may show a year’s growth in that year,” said Jodee Craven, the HUB project’s grant manager. “That’s great. Right? But when they start third grade, they still could be six months behind. ... What we learned we needed with them was more time.”

Newest school, poorest kids

Another thing Rochelle has done in recent years is pass a $5 million building referendum.

School leaders coupled that money with $12 million in capital grants to build a new elementary school on the city’s north side among newer subdivisions.

Then, instead of completely redrawing the district’s map and shifting nearly all of the district’s students into different schools, Rochelle leaders took the entire population of Lincoln Elementary School, the 100-plus-year-old building surrounded by older rental properties and near a trailer park, and put them in the new school. Lincoln’s student population is 90 percent low-income.

“We just determined that the same kids who went to the old Lincoln School would go to the new Lincoln School,” Prusator said. “We had to bus them anyway because of the railroad tracks, so why not bus them up there?”

There was some internal shifting of students from the very north of the city, Prusator said, but that was limited.

It’s just one more way the district is hoping to give the best opportunities to its students with the biggest challenges.

“We have great diversity, and we’ve embraced that,” said Adam Zurko, the district’s director of instructional services. “We’ve embraced our at-risk students, how they learn differently and the factors that impact their learning, and we’re constantly adjusting to meet their needs.”